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Gatling Crawler
"Everyone okay back there?" :- Gatling Crawler driver Tactical Analysis * Next stop, the front line: The Gatling Crawler of Red China serves to bring as many easily trained troops to the front as quickly as possible. With its 8 off-road wheels, it can do that on any terrain with ease. * Rapid Fire: The Gatling Crawler, as the name implies is armed with two anti-air Gatling cannons which can easily put hundreds of holes into any aircraft foolish to stray within range of its guns. * Everyone heads down: Unfortunately, the Gatling cannons cannot fire at ground targets, as its targeting system is not calibrated to do so. * Plenty of room: Some Gatling Crawler drivers have figured out various ways to increase the seating capacity of their transports, allowing them to double the number of passengers they can transport. The advantages are manifold, not least in that the increased seating allows the driver to lure in more ... passengers. Operational History Before the Bombs While the People's Liberation Army was rather notorious for its rejection of suggestions put forward by lower rankers and the punishment of those who made the suggestions (ostensibly because said lower rankers were doubting the PLA's supremacy, but really because most of the generals didn't want resources diverted away from their pet projects), the PLA's upper leadership is not completely blind. For all its tanks and all its men, the PLA was lacking a single effective anti air vehicle. This deficiency, as it were, was left unaddressed until the PLA assault on Nanjing, which resulted in terrible casualties on both sides. While the PLA upper echelon was willing to write off the loss of the thousands of men who had crewed the Battlemasters and fought with rifles, both General Tao and General Kwai were incensed by the loss of twelve Overlord tanks and the inglorious retreat of an Armageddon cannon, both the fault of Nationalist "Crossbow" helicopters, a local variant of the Longbow. Following this, both generals angrily demanded an effective anti-air vehicle of some sort (even though they had rejected suggestions for such a thing previously). With the backing of two generals behind the demand, General Leang and her experimental technology division were ordered by Chairman Mao to work on a solution to the problem, and develop an anti aircraft system. The initial plan was to mount a 37mm cannon on the vehicle and use that. However, because of the cannon's slow rate of fire, Leang's division soon switched over to Gatling weapons, which would be able to maintain an extremely high rate of fire without overheating. Development of anti-aircraft Gatling weaponry soon progressed from the stage of hand cranked Gatling cannon prototypes to Gatling cannons powered by gasoline powered motors. Radar sets reverse-engineered from downed fighters allowed the Gatling cannons to use radar tracking, making them far more efficient at following and shooting down aircraft than before. With the Gatling cannon to be mounted on a Battlemaster chassis, the Type-61 Gatling Tank was ready to go into service. It didn't, however, thanks to the suggestion for the improvement of the Gatling Tank made by a soldier. General Leang did not have the soldier punished, but instead had him transferred to her division (after all, it was a suggestion for an "improvement" to an existing project). Despite complaints from the other generals, the production of the Gatling Tank was delayed for three weeks while the vehicle was completely revised as per the soldier's suggestion. At the end of the three weeks, the new Type-90 Gatling Crawler (which killed two birds with one stone by combinining an APC and an anti-aircraft system into a single vehicle) went into mass production. The design soon proved itself to be an excellent one, with its one flaw being its inability to target ground units, and throughout the war thousands were produced. After the Bombs Though the bombs have fallen, a significant number of Gatling Crawlers have survived. The excellent design of the Gatling Crawler, something that had made it so useful in war, now also made it equally useful in the wasteland. The armour plating that it had demanded as a military vehicle make it resistant to small arms fire, while its eight large wheels give it excellent all terrain mobility even on the terrain of the wasteland. The spaciousness of the transport allows it to hold a large number of passengers, and best of all, it offers protection from radiation. The occupants of Gatling Crawlers, on the other hand, are a different matter. In the wastelands of former China, food is a commodity now many times more precious than gold, gems, or diamonds, and when driven to desperation to survive almost anything looks edible. Many surviving Gatling Crawler drivers, bereft of food stores but having in their hands a well-protected, reasonably spacious vehicle with - more importantly - a weapon attached to it, turned to the only viable food source that still existed in China - humans. Gatling Crawlers have become almost more feared than Battlemasters among hardened survivors, for as bad as the crews of the Battlemasters raiders are they at least operate openly. Gatling Crawlers, on the other hand, are like deceptively tempting carnivorous plants. Tales have spread amongst many a survivor encampment about a kindly Gatling Crawler offering a refugee group a protected ride to their destination, then murdering them in their sleep before gorging on their flesh. When near a Propaganda Centre, however, the ghoulish drivers part from their cravings. They will offer their services to the Centre for free, stop their eternal search for fresh meat, and almost return to the people they once were before the nukes hit. But looks and actions can be deceiving, for when questioned about why he stayed one driver informed a curious visiting foreigner that there were always fresh corpses to be stored away after a battle... Behind the Scenes * The result of merging the Gatling Tank and the Troop Crawler from Generals. Category: Units